Author Archive

You can read my new short story, "Mercury," in the Winter issue of Kweli, guest-edited by Danielle Evans.

The inauguration of the Spaceport of France was declared a holiday in Guiana, and tribes from as far as Brazil made camp along the coast to witness blastoff. It was a rainless day in the jungle, rocket fueled and gleaming on the launchpad. As the boys from Saint-Sébastien hopped off the school bus, commands crackled from the control center like the voice of God.

In Foreign Policy, Ruth Franklin examines the quest to write great literature, 140 characters at a time. Her essay discusses Twitter literature in a wide range of forms, including work from Teju Cole, Jennifer Egan, David Mitchell, Elliot Holt and others — and a mention of my 2014 Twitter Fiction Festival story, #PolarVortex, about an airport paralyzed by a winter storm:

"Public relations tweets from fictional airlines and ads for the airport's sushi bar mingle with the stories of stranded passengers and crew members — one anxiously en route to a job interview, another watching his relationship fall apart via text. With a nod to the increasing use of Twitter as a means for sharing images, Arnold's narrative takes advantage of the platform's visual capabilities, collaging weather maps, photographs and video in his feed."

At The New Yorker, Ian Crouch looks at the past, present and future of #twitterfiction, citing #PolarVortex as one example of "wild formal invention" on Twitter:

There’s potential on Twitter for wild formal invention. Rather than just fiction tweeted, writers could find narrative in retweets, faves, blocks, and unfollows, and write in not just words but images, GIFs, emoji, and hyperlinks. Characters might exist as different Twitter handles, put in conversation, or else many characters subtly inhabiting a single account. It would wade into the messiness of parody accounts, anonymous mystery accounts, brand accounts, fake brand accounts, bots, and real people posing as bots. There are examples of this kind of writing, and its real emotional and intellectual possibilities, in the archive of work created for the Twitter Fiction Festival, which was held this past March: God tweets out a new book of the Bible about Justin Bieber; a cast of characters tweet about being trapped in a fictional airport during the polar vortex; Henry David Thoreau gets a smart phone at Walden Pond. Twitter is often funny, and so is Twitter fiction, but there are stories, too, of lost love, loneliness, and despair.